Love In B&W - editing process

While this video might have been one of my simplest conceptually, the editing process to find what would be the most effective overall was the most difficult part of the whole process. I had originally planned to just film a video then colorgrade it to black and white, showcasing intimacy through close-ups and examining how the body interracts. I originally just colorgraded it into black and white and spent a while trying to get the contrast and textures to a level that I wanted, but then looking at it as a whole it just didn't seem to have enough visual interest or dimension.  I started messing around with the S curve until it was not an S curve at all, but the grade was very much geared towards harsh shadows and regular highlights, I liked how this looked as it made some shots look very surreal while other just looked like the black and while photography that I referenced in my last post. It really brought out some of the shapes and textures from the original video while obstructing others. I once again used a blur filter to distort the image analog, but this time most of the distortion was done in post. 

I then spent several hours trying to decide how to combine the black and white edit with the one in color, while I thought the one in black and white was enough on its own, I wanted to explore how they could both play against each other, I ended up spending a while with these two versions side by side and a slight 3D tilt applied, to try and mimic the feeling of an exhibition space and them being played together, but ultimately it didn't create the juxtaposition that I was looking for, just a comparison in colorgrade. As you can see here, I also tried mirroring the images to play with shape and reflection, but it just wasn't creating the visual effect that I was going for. I wanted the focus to be on the shapes and shadows of the body, but the videos put next to each other drew much more attention to the colors rather than the interactions going on between them. 

I then made several attempts at masking to create a more visually compelling version of these videos caombined, but once again it was too distracting from what I was originally trying to do with haptics. It is interesting seeing how these attempts went, I feathered the masks quite a bit for a less harsh line, although at one point I was attempting a half color, half black and white approach, but that seemed a bit heavy handed and made it look like one of the characters was dominant, or that the one in black and white was dead? It didn't really work, but I do like how the textures in the glass were brought out.

Once I'd finished these attempts, I decided that the best approach to use for this was the original colorgrade with the harsh shadows, but since I was no longer trying to bring more color into it, I decided to distort the original image a bit more, to bring in more texture and visual interest without compromising the shapes that I was trying to highlight. I did this by layering the same shot over each other, either making it a different size or just moving it slightly then changing the blending and opacity until it created a sort of shadow around the image. 

While the whole piece is very noisy and blurry, I think it was an effective way for me to learn to let go of conventional filming styles and techniques, as well as conventional editing. It allowed me to explore distortion and shape in a way that does not rely on narrative but purely on the process of filmmaking itself. 

For the sound design, I decided to go quite simple, as the video itself was already very distorted, using ambient sounds of rain and the street, as well as music overtop to create a calm atmosphere.